Where Black and White Youth Meet

Actor Danny Hoch felt a surge of mind-whirling confusion as he listened to the young boys standing before him.

He was in a small town in the middle of the Iowa cornfields--the heart of Apple Pie and American Dream country, right? So, why were these blond teenage boys in his face, telling him, “Yo man, I’m black, and if you don’t believe me I’m gonna get my posse and show you. . . .” Why were they spraying graffiti on farm houses and listening to Fat Joe, Snoop Dogg and Trick Daddy instead of Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chicks?

Hoch realized he had bumped into a new American cultural phenomenon.

“These were the blondest kids I’d ever met,” said Hoch, a Brooklyn native whose 1997 theatrical show “Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop” earned him critical acclaim. “But hip-hop had permeated them. We saw these kids throughout the country. America likes to think of itself as strip malls and apple pie and everybody eats at Denny’s. And here are these kids completely attracted to hip-hop.”

Hoch’s travels through the Midwest for an earlier show, “Some People,” spawned his character Flip-dogg--an ordinary white boy from Iowa longing to be an Original G--gangsta rapper.

Flip-dogg, played by Hoch, has become the protagonist of Fox Searchlight’s film “Whiteboys.” Directed by Marc Levin (“Slam”), the film opened Friday.

“Whiteboys,” which features the adventures of three white Iowa youths who emulate hip-hop stars, is not the only film dealing with this pop culture melange. Director James Toback (“Two Girls and a Guy”) is finishing his own take on the phenomenon in “Black and White.”

Comical Takes Mocked White Kids

Over the last few years, films like “Go,” “Can’t Hardly Wait,” “Zebrahead” and “True Romance” included white gangsta-wannabes. Those peripheral characters were mainly comical takes on the growing influence of hip-hop in American culture and style and mocked the desire of suburban white boys to sound and act like urban blacks--or at least like the image of urban blacks popularized in movies and music.

But “Whiteboys” is the first film that deals exclusively--and more seriously--with the theme of white middle America teenagers taken by hip-hop and gangsta rap.

Hollywood, it seems, has finally caught on to something that the music and fashion scenes have known for years: America’s non-black youth are accepting and co-opting hip-hop as their own social and cultural movement. At Woodstock 99, more than 200,000 people jammed in to hear white rap-rock bands like Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit and Korn, and the mostly white crowd roared when black rapper DMX sang “My N-----.”

Movie industry executives have been slow to understand the increasing multiculturalism that every young American lives with and, for the most part, embraces, said Hoch.

“For years, all I heard from half a dozen [movie] industry executives was ‘Look, Danny, your work is really good, but America is mostly white people and they don’t want to see that,’ ” Hoch said. “My answer was always, ‘Not only do white people want to see it and listen to it, they want to be it.’ ”

With race in America always a volatile issue, everyone from sociologist to hip-hopper is debating this “whiteboy” issue. Some complain that Hoch’s film and others like it are perpetuating the stereotypical image of black men as hoodlums and drug dealers and black women as prostitutes. The white kids’--known to each other in the film as “wiggers,” a common colloquial term for them--notions of blackness come directly from the MTV videos they watch endlessly, these critics complain.

In “Whiteboys,” Flip-dogg and his white friends are struggling with the deep identity crisis many working-class and middle-class white kids are also grappling with in today’s increasingly multicultural and competitive society. Hoch’s character swears he’s really black and that he has a skin disorder that causes him to be white. But being black, in Flip-dogg’s mind, equals being a gangster.

Indeed, critics of “Whiteboys” complain that the movie feeds into a fantasy notion that being poor and black is glamorous and hip. But many hip-hop artists and executives are actually savvy entrepreneurs, and not all come from the ‘hood, said Frank Williams, West Coast editor of the Source magazine, a hip-hop publication.

“It’s tunnel vision to think that we all walk around and say, ‘Yo, what’s up?’ ” Williams said. “Real [white] hip-hoppers try hard not to be their race, but they don’t pose as being black. It is not a sophisticated view of people [artists and producers in hip-hop] who are much more complicated.”

Mailer’s Essay Anticipated Films

Cultural critic Mia Mask, who edited a series of articles for Cineaste magazine titled “Race in Contemporary American Cinema,” noted: “There is a sentiment in the black community that there is a minstrel aspect to this. It just proves that white kids want to act black; they are acting out what they think is essential blackness.”

Director Levin agrees that there is an element of whites co-opting black culture for their own purposes. But he notes that in some cases the tables have turned: Whites have become the biggest audience for hip-hop and rap; Dr. Dre is the producer behind white rapper Eminem. Snoop Dogg not only lent his music to the “Whiteboys” soundtrack but also stars in the movie along with fellow rappers Dr. Dre, Fat Joe, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh.

Whites’ fantasizing about being black is not new. Norman Mailer addressed this issue of disenfranchised white youth identifying with black culture in his 1957 essay “The White Negro.” If the hipster in the “White Negro” had jazz, the “whiteboy” of the film has hip-hop.

In film and music, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, James Dean and other naughty boys of the ‘50s borrowed from black culture to create their own sense of style and dangerous allure, Mask said.

“Black masculinity and comportment has had this cachet of coolness. It had this whole register of coolness that was about bucking the establishment,” she added. “For a lot of middle-class white kids, blackness is the locus for counterculture in mainstream America. Wiggers are just the modern-day vestige of this larger phenomenon.”

Cultural, Not Racial, Hoch Argues

The situation becomes more complicated in today’s multicultural environment.

Hoch argues that the issue today is not a racial one but one of culture and class. Hoch grew up in a middle-class Jewish household in Brooklyn. He came of age during the birth of hip-hop, riding subways, tagging trains, hanging out with his homies or tagger crews.

“This identity crisis manifests itself culturally,” Hoch said. “You see rich white kids wearing baggy pants and rolling up their pant legs because it will make them look poor. Then you’ve got young poor kids in the ghetto donning Tommy Hilfiger sailing gear and Timberland camping gear and Nautica hiking gear when none of them have ever sailed or camped or hiked.”

Director Toback agrees. His film, set in New York and starring Brooke Shields, Robert Downey Jr., Ben Stiller and Mike Tyson, deals with a cross-section of classes. The film is to be released by Sony’s new Screen Gems division in the spring of 2000.

“We’ve reached a point now where the melting pot is no longer a fusion of white European cultures but now this multiracial fusion, which hip-hop is addressing,” he said. “This is a reinvention of rules, of morals definitions, parameters and limits of behavior.”

The “whiteboy” phenomenon has spurred dozens of Web sites--some virulently racist--debating the issue. Hip-hop is the way for American youth--of all colors--to address the multicultural society they live in, Levin said.

“Historically, where black and white youth meet is a no-man’s land. And that is where the most interesting things in American culture have emerged,” Levin said. “Race is the profound wound in the American psyche. And yet it is the great promise that we could live in a multicultural society. Every generation has its own way of dealing with [race issues]. We are in a different place today, and these kids are trying to find a new way to talk about race.”